08.08.2007

SP's rival to Respect

Alan Stevens reports on the progress the National Shop Stewards Network is making

In my report of last month's founding conference of the National Shop Stewards Network (NSSN) I pointed to a number of problems, but was cautiously optimistic that some people were at least beginning to think (Weekly Worker July 12). However, I thought that the potential of the NSSN to begin rebuilding rank and file union organisation and confidence depended to a large extent on how the left groups engage with it. So how are things going?

The predominant focus of the original National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers (RMT) initiative, the initial NSSN steering committee and the proposed founding statement was to build a network of bone fide shop stewards that operates completely within the constraints of official trade union politics. It is a more militant version of the Transport and General Workers Union's attempt to rebuild its own shop stewards base, but both are designed to be fully incorporated within official trade unionism and not to 'interfere' with the various trade union bureaucracies.

Both left and right top bureaucrats want more strength and more recruiting power - and they do not want it messed up by what they see variously as unrepresentative lefts or ultra-lefts who cannot deliver for the bureaucracy. They want Joe or Jill Bloggs - what they consider to be mainstream workers - or at least enough of them, together with 'reasonable' or 'safe' lefts, to moderate the 'trouble-makers'.

Additionally for RMT general secretary Bob Crow the NSSN was also the means by which he could deflect pressure for a new workers' party now to some time in the future - a future where the existing left groups might be outnumbered by a rebuilt mainstream shop stewards network. Bob has long since lost patience with the 'Reclaim Labour' brigade, but does not see either the Socialist Workers Party's Respect or the Socialist Party's Campaign for a New Workers' Party as suitable alternatives.

The Socialist Party, which dominated the initial steering committee, was happy to pander to Bob Crow's scheme and downplayed the CNWP at the conference. It also effectively operated as the 'safe left' - brothers and sisters who could moderate the impractical excesses of the ultra-lefts that might alienate the bureaucrats.

However, when winding up the conference, Bob Crow said the RMT might field candidates in next year's GLA and mayoral elections to highlight the campaign against privatisation of the underground. He offered a sort of vague strategy whereby unions such as the RMT and Fire Brigades Union run election campaigns, which if successful might begin to coalesce into a new workers' party that could act as an alternative pole of attraction to the Labour Party. So now the SP has brought its Campaign for a New Workers' Party to the fore.

Its two London councillors, Ian Page and Chris Flood, have since written (strangely under the name of the CNWP) to the London region of the RMT, FBU, Communication Workers Union and Public and Commercial Services Union, to the National Pensioners Convention, to individual London CNWP members and to some other local campaigns. They refer to Bob Crow's statement at the NSSN founding conference and suggest an electoral list for the GLA and mayoral elections headed by the "RMT, including socialists, other trade unionists and community campaigners against cuts and privatisation", adding: "It could be an important step on the road towards a new mass party."

It is interesting that the SP did not address its request to the SWP/Respect. It also did not address it to the NSSN, which perhaps confirms that the latter is a sort of SP front. So we have the two largest left groups operating as sects and pursuing agendas that favour their own projects - Respect and the CNWP/NSSN respectively - rather than what is in the interests of the whole class.

It is conceivable that a loose Bob Crow/SP arrangement similar to the Galloway/SWP arrangement could arise - SP foot-soldiers for an RMT electoral challenge and/or Bob Crow fronting a list including the CNWP. Where will that leave the more thinking element visible at the founding NSSN conference? A few individuals had their say at the founding conference and there were some genuine rank and file elements present - but not sufficient to resist the dominant group's pragmatic drive to do things without thinking.

The Socialist Party argues that the struggle for independent working class political representation and the development of rank and file union organisation and confidence through an organisation like the NSSN are key aspects of the same struggle. The content of this struggle is what matters though - and here the Socialist Party just carries on as usual.

We have to ask how the SP, which dominates the NSSN, specialises in incorporating itself into the union bureaucracies at all levels and like the rest of the left has little experience of actual rank and file organisation, can genuinely develop a shop stewards' network. This problem needs to be recognised and addressed, as some suggested. But the SP is in a hurry. It thinks that having lots of people on union NECs gives it a good enough grounding in trade union work. And this fits in with its limited aim of a Labour Party mark two, which the CNWP was set up to campaign for and in which the SP will operate as functionaries awaiting the day when the workers are ready for Marx to be taken out of the cupboard and dusted off.

What is necessary to advance the interests of the working class as a class does not come into the reckoning. Instead the SP simply adapts to what it perceives is practical and possible as things stand now. Unburdened of the requirement to analyse problems of organisation, consciousness and political independence for the whole class, the SP promotes a backward-looking sectional agenda - one in which the SP will again be submerged within a mass social democratic party. A combination of opportunism, sectarianism and subservience to spontaneity pervades the SP method.

So the NSSN is not dead by any means, but it is not as well as could be expected.

As for the proposal to contest next year's GLA elections, we, of course, will welcome and support working class candidates - but critically. Single-issue electoral challenges against privatisation or cuts are totally inadequate. Neither does the SP's old Labour set of economistic demands fit the bill.

What about the SWP and Respect (not to mention the rest of the left)? Why should they be excluded from those invited to discuss a "broad, anti-cuts, anti-privatisation, anti-war electoral list"? We, of course, would propose that all those strands should be brought together on a common  platform centred on the demand for a democratic republic.

But it seems the SP is more concerned with constructing an electoral bloc to rival Respect than a genuinely united working class challenge.